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Girls get to perform silly stunts or share secrets with the group to gain points. Points are used to buy fortune cards and the first girl to collect all 4 fortune cards won.

As a child of the 90s, this game was pretty much all the rage at every sleepover I ever attended. While the game was designed to be revealing, the makers probably never realized how revealing it would actually be. Secrets aside, you can tell a lot about a girl based on how she played the game. For example, there was always that one girl who would never play a truth card and would always act like her secrets were too scandalous to breathe a word of. She’d take a zit sticker to pass on the turn, sitting for hours on end with her face covered in little round dots. There would also be a group jokester that would go above and beyond on stunt cards. Then there was the girl that seemed to be shameless, telling secrets, performing stunts and doing whatever it took to win.

I was that girl.

But it wasn’t always fun and games, no there was a fair amount of strategy involved. While the other girls were giggling about first kisses and dream jobs, I was strategizing. Like any other board game, there were ways to win and I knew them all.

There was no rule saying I had to tell the truth, so when a truth card came up and the secret wasn’t something I was willing to share, I’d dip into my imagination and make something up. The key was to make it believable enough that nobody would question it, but not interesting enough that they would share it. I was a magnet for the question about which boy I had a crush on. This one was a breeze to avoid! My family would travel cross-country every summer to visit my dad’s family, so I simply said there was a boy that lived next door to my aunt that I met over the summer and simply couldn’t forget. They’d ask a couple questions – what does he look like, what’s his name? I’d make something up and we’d move on. Nobody knew him and Facebook wasn’t a thing yet, so it was forgotten in a day or two. I’d get my points and nobody would be the wiser.

The stunt cards were a little harder and my absolute refusal to sing in front of people (childhood trauma) necessitated a few zit stickers from time to time. Still, I always seemed to have less than the competition, which meant my fortune cards were gathered faster and my odds of winning significantly increased. I must say though, the fortune cards were not right. My life didn’t wind up anything like the game predicted.

From a nostalgia standpoint, I’d love to get my hands on a copy of Girl Talk. It would be fun to have a 90s themed party and bring it out. Everyone could put on their best wind pants and put their hair up in scrunchies while chatting about crushes and reliving our childhoods.